162 Port anD the Douro
registered and, pending its approval by the Câmara de Provadores (tasting panel), a current
account will duly be opened for the wine. Approval from the tasting panel used to be a
rubber-stamping exercise but a number of shippers have been taken aback when their
wines were rejected and samples had to be resubmitted. Following a change in the law
that accompanied the 2000 vintage declaration, the wines may be bottled as soon as they
have been officially approved. Consequently most shippers are now bottling earlier than
in the past, avoiding the summer heat. Vintage Port may now be bottled at any time until
31 July in the third year after the harvest. The wines may be shipped at any time after 1
May of the second year.
uk Bottling oF vintage Port
there is considerable bottle variation between different bottlings of the same wine from
vintages prior to and including 1970, when vintage Port was frequently shipped in pipe
and bottled by individual UK wine merchants. although UK bottling was often better
than that in Portugal, it was not unknown for a wine to languish in wood for an extra
year or more thereby increasing the amount of oxidative maturation and changing the
character of the wine. there are some who say this was for the better as the delay
helped to stabilise colour. there was also a tradition in the UK to roll the pipe of wine
before bottling, thereby mixing up the sediment so that it was evenly shared between
bottles. however, unscrupulous merchants were also free to stretch the blend with a
generous slug of young ruby, although i have absolutely no proof of anyone doing so.
i have long wanted to take a single declared Port from, say, the 1963 or 1966 vintage,
and compare bottles from different UK merchants with the same wine bottled by the
shipper in Vila nova de Gaia.Once a vintage Port has been bottled, it continues to develop and evolve over a period
of fifteen to twenty years or more before it is considered as being ready to drink. Rather
like the seven ages of man, the wine enjoys a short, fragrant bloom of youth before it
shuts down and endures ten, even fifteen years of surly, spotty adolescence. Then it slowly
begins to emerge as a fully fledged adult, gaining stature and gravitas until the Port reaches
its peak, often at around twenty or thirty years of age. For the finest vintage Ports the
peak becomes a long plateau. Old age need not be reached for eighty or more years, as I
found when I tasted a bottle of Taylor’s 1912 at Roy and Doreen Hersh’s Port weekend in
Seattle in 2003. It still had a fabulous rosy freshness about it and was happily alive at the
age of 91. Throughout the ageing process, vintage Port slowly softens and sheds its colour,
forming a ‘crust’ of sediment on the inside of the bottle. This means that all vintage Ports
need decanting, a procedure that is a deterrent to some but is in fact just as easy as the
wines are to drink (see section on decanting on page 200).